


waking up

by Charowak



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen, Gun Violence, Hospitals, Injury Recovery, Surgery, wholesome platonic content, yes at the same time, yes im a dirty shipper of both samjosh and donnajosh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 08:25:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18205979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charowak/pseuds/Charowak
Summary: after being shot, josh returns to the world and the first people he sees are the ones he loves the most.





	waking up

“GUN!”

Everything happened in a matter of seconds. It didn’t seem to matter to Josh where he was going; he thought it had been the car but found himself throwing his body forward and grasping the gate in front of him. He heard someone cry for help and scrambled to his feet, and before he knew it it was there, the bullet, it had gone directly through his shirt into his abdomen, which was already bleeding. He wanted to scream but his voice didn’t work; instead he crawled to the nearest wall he could see and leaned his back against it.

There were echoing voices in his head, the voices of the deceased, he supposed; they screamed, “Sleep! Sleep! Go to sleep!” Josh struggled to keep his eyes open because frankly he wasn’t tired, his stomach just hurt a lot. The distinction between the screams of the dead and those of the living around him began to blur. Someone was shouting, “Where’s Josh? Has anyone seen Josh?” but he couldn’t tell if that voice was from this world or the one he seemed to be moving towards. Then there was Toby, first his voice behind him and then his face in front of him as he looked in shock at his bleeding friend. Josh looked at Toby, not hearing a word he was saying, and opened his mouth; he tried to say, “Help,” but he didn’t think the word made it past his throat.

He did hear Toby’s frantic shouts, “I need… I need a doctor! Someone’s been hit!” and felt his arms beneath his head as he finally slumped over, into the black world that was the source of the screams.

*

“He’s awake!”

“Good, then the oxygen is working.”

“Gunshot wound, no exit!”

“Mr. Lyman, can you hear me?”

Josh couldn’t see much above him. There were faces, none of which he knew, and he was lying down, likely on something wheeled. He mumbled a noise of consent, because he could hear the person requesting, but already his consciousness was bouncing between the hospital he was being wheeled into and Leo McGarry’s face against the backdrop of the Capitol reflecting pool.

“I want you to come see Jed Bartlet speak in New Hampshire.”

The people above him were still there. Were they someone Hoynes had sent him to meet with? He didn’t remember. “I shouldn’t be in this meeting,” he mumbled as they continued to speak to him, not hearing what they were saying. “I should be in New Hampshire.”

“It’s something sons do for old friends of their fathers.”

“Josh!” A face he knew at this strange meeting of people he didn’t. “You went to New Hampshire! We both did. You came and got me. Remember?”

“S…” Josh focused as much as he could on this one person who was making sense. “Sam…”

Sam’s hand rested firmly on Josh’s shoulder, on the side that didn’t hurt so much. “Yeah, Josh, it’s me. I’m here.”

“Sam…” He tried to reach for his friend with his left arm, but it didn’t want to move. Suddenly he was moving again, away from Sam, who stood in his shock and sadness, and Josh could see it for as long as he was in view. “What’s… he so worried about?” he mumbled. “My stomach hurts.”

“Josh, you have a collapsed lung and a perforated artery. I’m putting in a tube now to re-inflate your lung…” Someone placed a mask over his face, and his lapse of consciousness came to an end.

*

“Donna, Josh was hit.”

Donna somehow found her way to the chair; CJ behind her gently placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to think of words to say that could ease the shock when none would come. Slowly, impatient from waiting, the senior staffers began to disperse. Leo went back to the White House, CJ and Sam went with him; then Toby, then Charlie. They went in and out of the room for what seemed like hours. Donna noticed Abbey stayed with her consistently, the one face in the room that seemed to be completely calm all through the horrible night. She got up at one point to look in through the window at her boss as he underwent surgery to remove the hot lead from his body and repair the damage it had done; she prayed fervently, something she seldom did, for his health and strength. Time did not seem to pass normally while she watched, but she became aware of a body behind her. When she turned to acknowledge him, Sam gently put his arm around Donna’s waist. She turned to him, gripped him tightly, and buried her face in his shoulder; he gently rubbed her back as he glanced into the operating room where his best friend lay on the edge of the living and the dead.

*

Josh was floating. The pain was long gone, and he hung suspended in the space one enters only in dreams, except he was fully conscious in that space, the vast fissure between the world he knew and the one frequently called the underworld, although he could see now that these two lands lay side by side, the land of the living and the land of the dead. He had spoken with his father and sister in the time he had been asleep; he had recalled every action, every word and movement, that had brought him to where he stood at this impasse. 

“Josh.”

It was coming from the vast emptiness to his right, the world of the light, which he turned then to face. “Josh, I need you to wake up now.” With one final glance at the world of darkness behind him, in which he could, only faintly now, see the faces of Noah and of Joanie and the billions that had gone there before him, he walked to the light, and he found himself flat on his back, an IV drip in his right arm, and the two father figures he had in the world of light standing above him: President Bartlet and Leo McGarry. He blinked several times, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again to shake the feeling of the interverse travel he had just completed, and as the man on his left, the one he had put in his seat as leader of the free world, leaned down to hear his first words upon awakening, Josh said the very first thing that found its way from his mind, in its perfectly blissful state, to his lips: “What’s next?”

He saw the grin on Leo’s face and the twinkle in his eyes, and the satisfied, fatherly smile of the President who Josh would learn had also been shot, and within seconds the details of his voyage between the worlds had dissipated like smoke into the night air, searching for the depths of his subconscious where they would remain until the moment he left this world for good.

*

Josh slept a lot the first few days of his being awake. It seemed that when anyone came to visit, he was sleeping, and he would wake up to find flowers, a teddy bear, or a giant card signed by everyone on senior staff and the assistant level sitting on the bedside table. These gifts seemed to vanish between times that he slept and times he was awake; he would briefly wonder where they had all gone and then return his consciousness to the room he was in. He measured time by counting the number of IV bags the nurses changed, and when he was up to eleven, his nurse came in and said, “Mr. Lyman, can you see a visitor?”

The oxygen mask was still on, and Josh could hear his own breathing louder than most other things. He nodded faintly, and the nurse left. He craned his neck as much as he could, which was not much at all, in an attempt to see who was coming in to see him, and as soon as he could, he began to smile, so widely that the suction around the mask began to loosen and it started to slip slightly. “Shit, shit, we can’t have that happening, now can we?” said his visitor, who pressed gently on the mask to get it back into place before grabbing a chair and scooting it up next to the bed.

“Sam,” Josh said between breaths.

“Yeah. Hey.”

“Hi.”

Sam found Josh’s right hand, the one on the arm connected to the morphine drip, and clasped it between his two. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m…” Josh directed his eyes towards the IV bag hanging above the bed. “This stuff helps.”

“I’m sure it does.” Sam laughed as he said it, then sniffed, so Josh could tell he wasn’t  _ just  _ laughing. Neither could erase the smiles that had formed on their faces, although Josh was careful not to smile hard enough to release the oxygen mask.

“Tell me… about work,” Josh said.

“Oh, you don’t want to hear anything about that.”

“Yeah… I do. I miss you guys.” 

They were quiet for a couple of seconds. “We all miss you too,” Sam said, barely above a whisper.

“Our approval ratings?” Josh knew he had to keep his friend from crying, because he knew if that happened he would cry too, and with a tube in his arm and a mask on his face he would be in no position to wipe up the resulting tears and snot.

“Through the roof,” Sam said.

“And all that had to happen was for me and the President to almost die… We were so far behind, we were working so hard to bring them up.”

Sam chuckled. “Don’t go into anaphylactic shock, okay, but I think the numbers are soft.”

“They’ll become hard, you know… All we have to do is survive. And keep living, and doing good work, and the American people will see... that we remain strong and become even stronger… in the face of tragedy… and the numbers, they’ll become hard.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. That’s what we have to do.”

The two longtime friends sat and discussed politics for what Josh measured as two and a half IV bags, before Sam began to shift around in his chair. “I should really get back to work,” he said, an air of sadness to his voice, as if he was afraid Josh was still in the process of quickly dying and would never see him again.

“The country won’t run itself,” Josh said.

“Yeah.”

Sam got ready to stand up, but Josh stopped him. “Wait, Sam.”

“Yeah?”

“Sam, I love you, so much… I love you so much, man.”

Sam’s resulting smile seemed to break his face, and Josh noticed his friend’s eyes fill up before he quickly released Josh’s hand with one of his to wipe at his face with his sleeve. Sam’s face remained wet despite his efforts as he half-said, “I love you too, Josh,” and leaned down to the hand he was still holding to kiss it briefly before he stood up and left the room, glancing back at Josh to wave as he walked out.

Unfortunately for Josh, this event had also caused his eyes to fill up, and once Sam was gone, tears were streaming down the sides of his face and snot was flowing into his mouth underneath the oxygen mask, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He tried to keep his breathing steady, since when he tried to sob even a little bit he could feel the sharp pain in his recently collapsed lung despite the morphine. Through his blurred vision he could see out the window of the room his friend mopping up his face with a handkerchief before going back to the west wing to do what he did best, which was assisting in the leading of the free world, and Josh looked forward to the day he would be back in that wing with him and all the other people he loved so much.

*

“Mr. Lyman, can you--”

The nurse wasn’t even able to finish his sentence before the seat next to Josh’s bed was occupied. “Sam told me you were awake and he saw you and I just came over here as soon as I could, I wanted to--”

“Donna?” Josh had upgraded from the oxygen mask to the nasal tube after the nurse had come in and washed his face following the bout of sinus-produced fluids induced by his last visitor, and he had gained the ability to speak without sounding like an astronaut, though his sentences were still spread into noticeable segments by the deep breaths of pure oxygen he still took. “I missed you!”

“I missed y-you too!” Donna had cut to the chase and was already crying like a little bitch at the sight of Josh being awake. 

“Hey, don’t do that… I’ve already been through one person crying, and making me cry too, and that guy out there had to wash my face and everything.” Josh reached over his body towards Donna’s face, and she leaned into his hand to make up for the distance that he could not reach.

“The male nurse washed your face?” Donna sniffled, making a bit of a snorting noise, but not in an ugly way even in the least; Josh found it endearing. “That’s a little gay.”

“Gay? I’m not gay.”

“Sam was in here crying and you were crying too? That’s also a little gay.”

“You’re crying right now, more than Sam and I were combined. Are you gay?”

“No…”

“Then shut up.”

“Hey, you should be dead right now.”

“But for the grace of God, and this morphine drip, I am not, Donnatella. I live, to fight.”

“God, Josh, I’m so glad, I’m so happy you’re going to be okay.”

“Donna, listen, I know I’m always a prick, and a bad boss and stuff--”

“Shut up, Josh, you’re neither of those things, and you are not stuff.”

“Let me finish. I’ve been really mean to you, and recent events have, uh, caused me to consider how much, you mean to me.”

“Josh--”

“Shh, I’m complimenting you, Donna! You are a beautiful, smart woman and the best assistant, I could ever hope for. And I’m so glad, that I have you working for me, and I wouldn’t trade you for the world.”

“T-thank you, Josh,” Donna said. “You’ve never said anything so nice about me.”

“Yeah, don’t get used to it.”

Donna spent the next three or four IV bags telling Josh benign tales of the assistant level as well as all she knew of what was going on in terms of running the country, and when he sent her away with a couple of projects to handle on his behalf, he settled back into his bed comfortable and happy.

*

The last person to visit Josh while he was both conscious and on IV fluids was the First Lady. When she entered his room, he started out of habit. “Madam! ...I’m supposed to be standing, right?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Joshua. Settle down.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

He updated the seasoned doctor on his medical condition, namely that he was on his last bag of IV fluids according to the supervising physician, and that they were going to put him on oral painkillers and liquid meals.

“What are your vitals?” Dr. Bartlet asked, settling into the chair by the bed.

“I don’t know, uh, I think they’re in a chart somewhere.” Josh gestured around the room with his left, non-stuck arm. 

“You should know these things about yourself, Josh. You almost died.”

Josh laughed it off. “How’s the President recovering?”

“He’s doing very well. He sends his regards to you, as does Leo.”

“Yeah, tell them I say hi.”

The two sat quietly for a moment. “The road to recovery begins now, Josh,” Abbey said. “It’s going to be long and hard, and things will never be the same again.”

“Yeah, and not just for me,” Josh added. “For everyone.”

“You’re absolutely right.” Abbey stood up, pushing the chair neatly back into its position by the wall. “Josh, I can’t stay very long, but I want to know you will take care of yourself and get better. My husband needs you, Leo needs you, and your country needs you. No one can imagine doing this without you, kid.”

“Thank you, Dr. Bartlet.”

Abbey did a quick wave as she exited, hollering for the nurse on her way out. “Steve! Tell me Josh’s vitals.” 

Josh watched her conversation with the nurse; he didn’t understand what they were saying, but their moods seemed good so he hoped his condition was as well. Within an hour, they had removed the needle from his arm and placed in front of him a big glass of water as well as some fine hospital cuisine, and they had turned on the TV where CJ was briefing, providing the country with the news of his great workplace, the good work they had done that day, and the even better work they planned to do the next. Josh smiled, sipped the first bit of water to go down his throat since Rosslyn, and looked forward to the day he would once again enter the west wing to do what he truly felt to be the greatest job in the world.


End file.
